Woman strangled to death at Montreal métro station after scarf gets caught in escalator

A 48-year-old woman died Thursday morning in the Fabre métro station after it appears her scarf and then her hair got caught in the teeth of the escalator. She was strangled by her scarf.

The incident, which has been deemed an accident by Montreal police, happened at 9:15 a.m. at the station on Jean Talon St. E. in the Villeray district, said Constable Jean-Pierre Brabant.

“The woman’s scarf got caught in the escalator and then she bent down to try to get it out and her hair got stuck too,” Brabant said. “A bystander called 911 and by the time police arrived, she was declared dead.”

“We got a call a little after 9 a.m. that there was a woman found at the bottom of an escalator, trapped, and that there was an article of clothing involved,” said Robert Lamle, a spokesperson with Urgences Santé. “The woman was in cardiac arrest.

“The firefighters, first responders, got there first and began resuscitation efforts. Our technicians arrived and took over but it was not viable and the woman was declared dead,” Lamle said.

The police are assisting the Quebec coroner in this case and the southwest entrance to the métro station where the escalator is located is closed until further notice, Brabant said.

Fabre is on the blue line, but no métro service was disrupted. The STM said this was a police matter and had no comment other than offering condolences to the family of the woman who died.

Police will be studying surveillance video to ascertain exactly how the woman became caught.

Métro escalators have proven dangerous in the past.

In 1989, a 2-year-old girl lost four fingers on her right hand after an incident involving an escalator at the Guy-Concordia métro.

The girl dropped a bag of raisins on to the escalator, which she was riding with her mother. When she reached down to pick it up, her hand got caught in the gap between the side of the escalator and the moving stair.

Doctors could save only her thumb. Her other fingers had to be amputated.

The judge in that case found that transit authority personnel had been aware for a long time that spaces between the sides of 120 métro escalators and the moving stairs exceeded the 6-millimetre provincial Labour Department norms.

“It was dangerous and it constituted a trap for users,” the judge wrote.

Transit escalators have been the cause of deaths in the past.

Last year, a Seattle man died after he fell on an escalator at a transit station and his shirt became stuck, choking him to death.

In Boston, two people have died in escalator accidents in recent years.

In 2009, a woman fell on an escalator and a piece of her clothing got caught in the machinery. She suffered cardiac arrest and died.

In 2005, a man was killed when the hood of his sweatshirt slipped into a gap in a subway escalator’s machinery and the moving stairs squeezed it around his neck.